A One Mann’s Movies review of “Nightbitch” (2024) (From the 2024 London Film Festival).
Marielle Heller is a director who has previously given us quirky offerings such as 2018’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and 2019’s “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood“. Here with “Nightbitch” she gives us an equally strange offering that makes some telling points about parenthood, is at times laugh-out-loud funny, but which sadly never really fully engaged me.
Bob the Movie Man Rating:
“Nightbitch” Plot Summary:
A former acclaimed artist, Mother (Amy Adams), is now a mother of a 2 year old boy (Arleigh/Emmett Snowdon) that is crushing her spirit to death. Her travelling husband (Scoot McNairy), when he is home, is next to useless in supporting her. As her mental state becomes more on edge, the self-confessed hypochondriac thinks that she is turning into a dog.
Certification:
UK: NR; US: R. (At the time of writing, this had not been rated by the BBFC. I believe it would be a ’15’ due to language, sexual content and disturbing scenes.)
Talent:
Starring: Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Jessica Harper, Zoë Chao, Mary Holland, Archana Rajan, Ella Thomas, Stacey Swift.
Directed by: Marielle Heller.
Written by: Marielle Heller. (Based on the book by Rachel Yoder.)
Running Time: 1h 38m.
“Nightbitch” Summary:
Positives:
- Amy Adams gives a terrific full-on performance.
- The script has many laugh out loud moments
Negatives:
- The points the film is trying to make were unclear to me, other than “motherhood is hard”.
- Some of the body horror aspects of this will not be to some viewer’s tastes.
Review of “Nightbitch”:
Strong opening laughs.
I hadn’t actually clocked that this was supposed to be a comedy (albeit a black one) before going in to see it. So the opening laugh was a surprise. “Mother” (Amy Adams) runs into a friend at the supermarket who gushes to her that being a stay at home Mum must be so great. “Mother” then spouts into a superb monologue about how unhappy she is: “I would love to feel content. But I feel stuck in a prison of my own making…..” she begins. We then flip back a minute in time and hear the answer she actually gave, which is “basically “Yes, it’s wonderful.”Yeah, I do, I love it!” The film uses this device a few times and because Amy Adams is so good at her job, it generated a laugh each time.
And Amy Adams is REALLY good in this. She clearly loaded on the pounds to play the role of the snack-munching mom with no opportunity to exercise and stay fit. She is almost unrecognisable from the Amy Adams in her other roles. It’s the sort of physical transformation that often sits well with the Academy voters.
They never tell you that parenting young children is often hell.
We see the appalling drudgery of looking after a young child through a montage of endless cooking of waffles and book reading and trying to get the little f***** to sleep he really doesn’t want to go to sleep and all you want to do is scream! This will all have parents all nodding along in recognition and sympathy.
It doesn’t help that “mother” really dislikes socialising with other parents, so events like the local toddler singalong down at the local library are hell on earth for her too.
The relationship with the son’s Dad (Scoot McNairy, tellingly described as “The Husband” in the credits and not “The Father”) is strained. When ‘Mother’, reminiscent for me of Mrs Elephant in the classic Jill Murphy book “Five Minutes Peace”, goes for a lie down while ‘The Husband’ takes ‘The Son’ for a “daddy bath”, she gets barely 30 seconds of peace between continual interruptions before she eventually blows her top. As “The Husband” goes off on his next business trip she hisses “Enjoy getting 4 full nights of sleep” as him.
Canine intuition
It seems clear that the night bitchiness is all in her mind. But what comes out of her mind is periodically pretty f-ing disgusting. In particular, in a body horror episode that, thinking about it again, makes me want to cough up my own furball, ‘mother’ uses a sterilised needle to investigate a lump on her coccyx. (The image is lodged in my mind and kept coming back to me as I tried to eat my sandwich in Leicester Square later!)
Further physical (or probably mental) manifestations follow. And, you’ll obviously not have any difficulty predicting what her favourite sex position is when she does get it on next with ‘husband’.
In addition, the local dogs start showing extreme interest in her, leaving dead offerings on her doorstep. And if you are worried that dogs don’t like cats and the family have a pet cat that might be in danger… then you would be right to worry. This is another movie – and there have been a few of them at this year’s LFF – that animal lovers might not enjoy.
What message are we supposed to be taking away?
Overall, I was left a little confused by the whole canine transformation thing. What is the message we are supposed to be left with – that mothering a child brings women nearer to their animal instincts? That like lions in the wild, the mothers do most of the work and the male just lies around a lot, occasionally injecting sperm when required?
Some of the flashbacks used really don’t help with that either. We flash back to see ‘mother’ being brought up by a puritanical community, with her own mother looking equally sad and trapped and – at one point, real or imagined – running off into the forest at night on all fours. I didn’t get it.
“Motherhood is f****** brutal”
Where this might be useful is to show the film to high-schoolers as an initiative to reduce the rate of unwanted teenage pregnancies. Because if you don’t know parenting is hard before seeing this film, then you will afterwards. As the relationship of ‘the husband’ and ‘the wife’ comes to an argumentative head, he shouts at her “What happened to my wife?” and she snarks back “She died in childbirth”. It’s a line that’s a bit on the nose… but it really sums up her mental state.
Summary Thoughts on “Nightbitch”
Nightbitch has its moments, particularly in reflecting how looking after young children can exert its own special form of mental torture. (I was reminded of Steve Martin’s “Parenthood” at times.) But I’m not sure it developed those ideas enough to fully work with me. I started thinking this might be a 4* film, then dropped it to 3.5*s. But now in writing the review and critically trying to think, other than the obvious, what it was trying to say, I’ve dropped it still further. It’s one I might need to give another viewing to reevaluate it.
Nightbitch is slated for release in the US on 6 December 2024. No official UK release has been confirmed, but it’s likely to be around the same time.
Where to Watch it (Powered by Justwatch)
Trailer for “Nightbitch”:
The trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=918prRymA-U. Note that this is the red-band (explicit) version.
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